100K would be a disaster for, say, the latest Call of Duty. But for this low-budget indie game, it’s a smashing success. Designer Davey Wreden believes that one of the primary reasons the game is doing so well is because he allows and even encourages people to record playthroughs of his game and post them on YouTube.

“Those guys and girls have enormous reach,” Wreden told WIRED via Skype. “When one of those people really likes it, two or three hundred thousand people were just told that this game is really fantastic.”

Such videos, often called Let’s Plays, can rack up millions of views. But they exist in murky legal territory: Do they fall under the banner of fair use, or not? Should a Let’s Play maker be able to make advertising revenue from their playthrough videos? Do Let’s Play videos have a right to exist, or do they exist only at the pleasure of the copyright holders? Companies like Nintendo and Sega have filed takedown notices or asserted rights to the advertising revenue of Let’s Play videos in the past.

Whether a company is in the legal right to do so or not, there is a compelling case that threatening the livelihood of YouTube channels is just bad business. The positive impact that can be had by some of the more popular YouTubers out there, says Wreden, is now impossible to ignore.

Instead of telling them to pull down their videos of Stanley Parable or attempting to divert their ad revenue towards himself, Wreden says that he worked hard to build a relationship with many of the most popular Let’s Players, and it seems to have paid off. Videos of top YouTube creators playing The Stanley Parable have millions of combined views, and it’s not hard to imagine that many of Stanley Parable‘s 100,000 customers found out about the game through a recommendation by their favorite YouTube channel.

As TotalBiscuit explained in a follow-up video, such a “copyright strike” can be extremely damaging to a YouTube content creator: Not only do they lose the video in question, but three strikes gets their entire channel deleted.